This section provides background information related to the present disclosure which is not necessarily prior art.
Combustion engines are known to produce emissions that may be harmful to the environment. In an effort to decrease the environmental consequences that an engine may have, exhaust after-treatment systems have undergone extensive analysis and development. Various components that assist in treating engine emission include particulate filters and oxidation and reduction catalysts.
Over time, some of the various exhaust after-treatment elements may require removal and servicing. For example, in the case of a particulate filter, the particulate filter may need to be serviced after it builds up a certain amount of soot. One way of accomplishing this is to make the various after-treatment components removable from the assembly, and then cleaned separately. Depending on the size of the engine application, however, the time and difficulty of this task can increase. In this regard, larger engine applications such as locomotive, marine, and large horsepower stationary applications can produce substantially more exhaust emissions than, for example, a tractor trailer engine application. The exhaust after-treatment systems, therefore, are generally much larger in scale to adequately treat emissions produced by these large-scale applications. As the scale of the after-treatment system increases, the ability to service such a system becomes substantially more difficult, often requiring a secondary support mechanism such as a crane to assist with component removal.
That is, when the exhaust after-treatment components are relatively large and heavy, a crane or some other type of heavy-duty lifting device can be required to remove the component from the exhaust after-treatment system when the component requires servicing. In fact, it is not uncommon to require a pair of cranes to remove a single component from the exhaust after-treatment system—a first crane to lift the element from the system, and a second crane to support a no-longer-coupled end of an adjacent component. If no second crane is available, however, the time required for servicing can be increased, which is undesirable.